


Thy Love for Me

by toujours_nigel



Category: Eastern Promises (2007)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-17
Updated: 2010-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:02:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirill touches you in the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thy Love for Me

Kirill touches you in the night, furtive like a child stealing sweets. (When he was five, and his father’s income resided primarily in the restaurant, he used to steal fruit chopped for the pudding, and get lashes as red on his skin as the strawberries in his mouth.) Kirill touches like his father is standing behind him with a whip and a sharp word, like every touch will cost him his stars. (He got his stars after his father stood by and saw him fuck a girl three years younger than him—no queer could get stars.)

You like Kirill in the night, heavy against you, silk and sweat and sour breath. His diurnal aggression tires you, and he is almost dangerously sweet like this, curled into the uncompromising ridges of your body like in a mother’s arms. (Kirill’s mother died so early he’s never tired of finding the most unlikely substitutes.)It is easy to forget the lust hidden so close to the surface of his eyes, so obvious even through eyelashes swooping down; it is comfortable to wrap an arm around his shoulders and card fingers through his hair. (He feathers kisses over your jaw, once, when he’s too drunk to pretend he only slumps against you because he’s too unsteady to walk, and settles closer with a contented sigh before you can react.) It is easy to accept Kirill’s pretences, to pretend, yourself, that he only touches you like he touches everyone, because he wants affection, because he craves approval. (Why it is more difficult to contemplate handing him over to Scotland Yard if you accept how he loves you you cannot tell, some things simply are.)

And then there are nights like tonight, when you wake to see his eyes on your mouth, his hand on your jaw, his body twisted against yours as though in pain. There are nights like tonight, when you pretend to have registered nothing, when you blink your eyes closed, and wait for the hand to move from your face, wait for the sigh, and wait for the warmth to recede from your side. (It is a little like you imagine sleeping beside a wolf might be like, or a wolf-hound, something vicious that strains against the leash and yet remains inevitably leashed.)

Tonight you wait, and wait, and wait, and the eyes stay on your mouth till the longing in them feels more a violation than anything Kiril would ever have the imagination to do to you. (Kirill has no imagination, Kirill hasn’t enough courage to have forced you in the whore-house, he only stood watching, yearning, while you and the other whore fucked for his reluctant pleasure.) You open your eyes, and he stares still, still keeps his hand on you, still keeps his right knee a steady pressure on your left thigh. You do not know what to do with this Kiril. (Why is this night different from all other nights?) Kirill should be all violence when he is awake, or melting tenderness when he thinks himself unobserved; this quietly savage observation is not in the rules. You lie staring up at him, propped on an elbow staring down at you. You let your eyes flick to his fingers cupping your jaw, and he smiles, a bitter twist of the mouth far more like Semyon than Kirill.

“I am queer,” he says, and presses his index finger into the hollow beneath your ear.

“Da,” you offer, “da, da, Kirill.” It is all you can think to say—you are too busy wondering what game he’s playing, whether he’s playing a game at all, beyond the transparent game of trying to get you in bed. (He’s got you in his bed. He’s had you in his bed for the past year, and you’ve been his for the ordering every night since he’s met you. He’s never even hinted at it.)

“You knew.” It comes out marred with resignation, too heavy with it to be the accusation it must have been in his mind. “Did you laugh about it, with Soyka?”

“I cut his fingers off,” you say, bland. “If I had known, I would have cut his throat myself.” (The Chechens would have had you anyway, and you know it, and feel the knowledge in Kirill’s body.)

“I did not know,” he says, and the tips of his fingers twitch against your skin. “I did not know,” he says again, and finally his eyes have moved from your mouth. You feel no relief.

“I know,’ you say, wrap your arm tight around his torso, over his ribs. (He’s grown thin again, in these last weeks of carting Semyon off to prison, and re-arranging the family.)

“I did not know you were at the hospital with Cristina,” he says. “I thought you were dead,” he says, and his fingers twitch again.

“I know,” you say again, heavy with the weight of your clandestine knowledge. You know Kirill did not know. You know Kirill had truly thought you were being invested with the stars as a reward. You know Kirill fought Semyon for the first time as more than a fit of childish petulance. You know Kirill covets you. You know Kirill loves you without a trace of resentment. You know a lot of things. You know too much.

“I thought you were dead,” he says again, like the memory of that thought stops his mind. (He laughs when you chop fingers down to the first knuckle, your Kirill, demands to touch the teeth you extract, running fingers delicately over the bleeding gums, the exposed roots. Death excites Kirill.)

“I’m not.” You curl your free arm around his waist, pull him tight against your side, run hands over his back like soothing a scared child. “I’m here. You’re with me.” (It’s what he’s been clinging to, that he’s with you, that you’re with him.)

“We’re partners.”He says it slowly, savouring the word, and you nod agreement, ignore how the movement brushes your mouth against his temple, how closely you are wrapped together, both your arms around him, his hands on your face and hip, his knee pressed against your thigh, his thigh between your legs. (He’s the one good at ignoring things, you watch everything, you cannot afford to be oblivious.) You close your eyes against his hair, wait for him to slump in sleep against you. You feel only relief that he’s lapsed into sentimentality, that his father’s hand on the leash is more a force for Kirill than the desire eating him up. Instead there’s a kiss, feather-light, against the rough skin of your jaw, and, quieter than before, “I’m queer, Kolya.”

“You’re my Captain.” You kiss his hair, tighten your grip on him till your knuckles whiten around his bicep. “You’re my King.” (He’s your pawn, but there are truths and there are truths.)

He nods, hair brushing your cheek. He presses his mouth to your jaw, to your throat, to the patch of skin visible between your collar-bones. He kisses the ink of your stars while you put a hand in his hair and roll him up on top of you, presses his face to your shirt and cries while you hold him. “I love you,” he says, leans up to brush his lips over yours, leans back down to hide against your skin. You pull him up by the hair and force open-mouthed kisses on him till he bites at your mouth, till he twists hands in your shirt and tugs you impossibly closer, rolls again and sighs when you are propped on him, like he finds the weight bearing him down comforting. “I love you,” he says, and again, and again, like a dam bursting, like a starved man faced with a feast. (He says he loves you, and you say, “da. Da, Kirill.”

He falls asleep holding onto you, and you lie awake planning how best to betray him.


End file.
